Still thinking about SIFF movies: A Review of Cargo

The film Cargo appears to be scary as hell. It has all the great accoutrement of a sci-fi horror, but its follow through is a let down.

In space no one can hear you complain about corporate irresponsibility....actually, they can.

The film opens on a young woman walking on a gorgeous field of green grains. This is RHEA, a new paradise light-years from Earth, which unfortunately has been irrevocably devastated by environmental degradation. Most of humanity lives on a massive corporate-owned space station, where disease outbreaks and political uprisings are a daily occurrence. The only escape is RHEA, but it's not a right, it takes money — a lot of money.

Money Laura can get, when she accepts a post as a cargo ship's doctor aboard the ship Kassandra for an eight year trip. Crew members are in hibernation for most of the trip, except for eight months, where they must man the ship alone. There are no windows, the ship automatically changes its artificial light from day to night mode and it's cold. 

Images of the ship in space are very reminiscent of 2001 — majestic and powerful — while inside it looks like the ship from Event Horizon and Alien, claustrophobic, dark and containing endless corridors.  

Read the full review (with spoilers) after the jump

The film builds heavily on the isolation that occurs in the first half. Laura redundantly goes about her duties, eats a brightly colored slurry every day, exhausts herself practicing boxing punches, stares longingly at a walls and sends messages of despair to her sister, who lives on RHEA. Then shadows start to appear behind her, the ship begins making strange noises and the cargo bay, forbidden to all crew members, has been opened.

This period of the film is tense and scary — the claustrophobic feeling of the ship matched against the agoraphobic feeling of deep space really makes this place and Laura feel endlessly isolated and alone. Here, space isn't the final frontier — it's a wasteland of nothingness. 

As the tension builds through the first half, that wasteland feels like a spectre of doom and death. But no, it's not.

Instead the film abandons the space as death metaphor and veers into a dull political, environmental and anti-corporate polemic that feels as tired as listening to a freshman college student after reading Noam Chomsky for the first time. As it turns out, RHEA is a virtual world housed on a space station, which was created by a gigantic corporation (who also owns the Kassandra) to tempt people away from returning to earth, which is actually quite habitable. 

I get it — corporations are bad. However, the film initially begs a much more interesting question suggested by the Kassandra's first officer: If Earth is ruined, doesn't humanity need a place to yearn for? Is an artificial world really that bad when there is nothing else to hope for? 

By revitalizing the Earth, the film doesn't have to consider this question. Instead, we're spoon fed — using bright colors — something we already know.